The present invention relates to cooling systems for snowmobiles and more particularly provides an auxilary engine cooling/passenger warming system for liquid cooled engine snowmobiles. Liquid cooled engine powered snowmobiles are now widely known and very popular. The current designs which incorporate various methods of cooling systems for the engines all have several shortcomings toward which the present invention is addressed.
Many popular models of today's snowmobiles utilize heat exchanger devices located in the drive track tunnel to take. advantage of the snow itself to aid the cooling effect. Such devices are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,835,948 to Duclo; and 3,901,335 to Johnson. Under certain circumstances however, to wit: operation of the vehicle on hard packed, icey, groomed trails which are gaining in popularity in many areas, there is not sufficient snow thrown up by the endless track to adequately cool the heat exchanger. As a result riders must either stop and manually throw snow onto the heat exchanger or simply stop and
Other designs utilize a radiator mounted in the engine compartment such as that described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,008,777 to Yasuro et al. but further require a cooling fan to function properly and cannot be added as an aftermarket item but must be designed into the snowmobile.
The present invention is designed to be added to any model snowmobile with a liquid cooled engine and adds additional cooling capacity to the system. It provides the further advantage of directing the warm air flowing from the cooling device to be directed toward the operator of the vehicle to provide additional warmth to the operator. It further requires no fans or other devices to function, utilizing only the air flow created by the rotation of the vehicle clutch itself.